Noir

I’d been working the case for hours and getting nowhere. Every time I thought I had something - a breakthrough - some detail would emerge and trash it. I was standing there, just staring at the crime-board, when the Chief flat-palmed the door open.

“Anything? Tell me you got something.”

He was starting to build up a good head of steam.

“No Boss. Nothin’. Just keep going round and round.”

“What in the name of see-through-budgie-smugglers am I going to tell the Mayor. He’s got a press conference in two hours. Lemme know the minute you have anything.”

And back out through the door he went in a cloud of muttered invective and bad temper.

I turned back to the board. All the players were there. Short ones, big ones, dark ones, light ones. There were the old ones I knew well and new ones that had only just appeared on the scene. It was a tangled mess and I had to get it sorted.

Twenty seven individual plain black socks and not a single pair to be found between any of them. How does it happen?

(True story. Well mostly. I sat down with them all laid out in front of me to just "get it done"… and that was two days ago. I’m down to harnessing the subconscious, like physicists and mystery writers do when they’re tackling something really tricky. I’m just walking past the laid out socks, hoping that I will see a pair out of the corner of my eye. )